


The Product of Sorrow and Desperation

by OpalFruits



Series: Life Lessons [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Arguing, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Irony, Less a story and more a series of snapshots, Political Background Noise, Prequel, Sad, Suicidal Thoughts (barely hinted at), Undyne and Alphys are two very different people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 13:09:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11578722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalFruits/pseuds/OpalFruits
Summary: Undyne and Alphys handled their grief in very different ways.Perhaps then, it's not so surprising that things ended up this way.*Kind of a prequel to 'The Mathematics of Love and Loss'. A little insight, for those who were interested, into the sinking of Undyne and Alphys' ship.*





	The Product of Sorrow and Desperation

Alphys never forgot where she was, when she learned that Frisk and Queen Toriel had died in the embassy explosion. Every detail of that day was etched in her mind, _branded_ there, a brutal reminder of yet another one of her seemingly endless failures.

She never forgot the way the mid-morning sun had streamed through the windows, nor the way the birds had gone on singing as though nothing were wrong. The harsh sob Undyne had let out as she broke the news – an awful, broken, _heart-wrenching_ sound _–_ was perhaps what she remembered best of all.

“They're d-dead!” Undyne – her brave, strong Undyne – had howled. “S-someone – the humans – they k-killed them!”

Alphys' world had caved in there and then.

She'd cried, of course – they'd both wept long into the night, clinging to each other desperately as though they could reverse it all with the strength of their embrace alone. They'd grieved together for their dear lost friends, whose only crime had been in wanting a better world for humans and monsters both.

But in her mourning, Alphys had felt the stirrings of the guilt that was to be come her constant – and eventually, _only –_ companion.

It was _her_ fault, you see.

 _She_ was the one who'd been in charge of designing the security system at the embassy. If she'd been better – more thorough – in her job, the explosion would never have happened.

Needless to say, she would never forgive herself.

 

* * *

 

Alphys and Undyne took radically different approaches in dealing with their grief. While Undyne rallied beside the King and the rest of the angry monster community, Alphys hid herself away in her old lab Underground. Undyne cried out for justice, while Alphys prayed for silence. Where Undyne longed to drown her misery in intimacy, Alphys recoiled from most social contact.

Perhaps then, them being so different, it should have come as no surprise that the two of them spent so much of that first year arguing.

“HOW CAN YOU HIDE YOURSELF AWAY IN HERE WHEN OUR PEOPLE NEED YOUR HELP?!”

“Th-they don't... no one n-needs me.”

“I JUST...!” Undyne had huffed angrily. Standing there, with her arms crossed and her face a mask of fury, Alphys remembered thinking that Undyne had never been more unreachable than she was right then. “I just don't get how you can sit here and do nothin' when... I mean, _God_ Alphy – even _Sans_ is doing his bit!”

Alphys should have said something, then. She should have – she didn't know, _stood up for herself,_ or – or _something_. Maybe if she had, things would have ended differently.

Instead she'd done what she always did. She'd nodded meekly, and promised to try harder.

“I'll... I-I-I'll do better. I promise.”

That very night, Alphys started drawing up plans. Designs for weapons and secret bunkers; an outline for an encrypted communications network; strategies for every eventuality, from brokering the ever more unlikely return of peace, to detailed battle schematics in the event of an all out war. She had even secretly concocted a number of evacuation plans, in case the situation took a turn for the worst and the monsters had to take action to avoid being sealed Underground again.

It was the best she could do. It was _all_ she could do. Alphys wasn't a fighter, not in any sense of the word – all she had at her disposal was her smarts.

If she'd known then, the awful things her smarts would some day be used to do...

Well.

There was no use worrying about things she _might_ have done.

 

* * *

 

By the time Sans and King Asgore came to her for help, Alphys had already (unintentionally) formed a rough concept design of the solution they were looking for.

She had come up with it during one of her darker moments – telling those apart from her regular moments was becoming increasingly difficult by that stage – not long after a leaked police report on the news had revealed that there were traces of monster dust in several dumps around the city.

Honestly, it had been no more than she'd been expecting. Monsters had been going missing for a while by then, with four having disappeared that year alone. Still, the news had hit Alphys hard – one of the missing monsters was her old friend, Bratty.

It wasn't much – nothing concrete, at least – but when the shock of the news had worn off, Alphys was immediately disgusted with herself. It was too extreme, she'd seen that right away. Asgore would _never_ go for such a vicious plan, she was sure, no matter how bad things got, and so she'd hidden it away in a drawer with the others.

She was, as it turns out, very wrong about that.

The day Asgore had visited her in the lab, he'd been sure to impress upon her the seriousness of their situation.

“I'm afraid the circumstances are dire enough that nothing but total domination will do,” he'd said in a deep and mournful voice. Behind him, Alphys recalled, Sans had stood in grim silence, his hands in his pockets and his expression betraying nothing. “The humans have given us one month to prepare for this war – if you believe you can come up with something that will allow us to win it, I would hear it now. Otherwise... we may have to consider a full evacuation back into the Underground.”

“Is... is it that b-bad?” Alphys, it should be noted, hadn't been above ground since the Queen and Frisk had died five years previous. She considered the seclusion a kind of repentance, a punishment for her mistakes, though Undyne had passionately (and repeatedly) insisted that none of what happened that day was her fault.

Asgore and Sans took turns filling her in.

The discord born of Frisk and Queen Toriel's deaths had grown into outright hatred – what Alphys knew via news reports and the Undernet wasn't even the half of it. Civil unrest was at an unprecedented high, and the humans' political system was in shambles. None of the people with any kind of power could seem to agree on what to do, instead spending their time in meetings that never seemed to end, arguing about the same things over and over and over again. In the mean time, monsters and humans quarrelled in the streets with increasing frequency, and while the human police and the Royal Guard _were_ doing their best to keep the peace, they could scarcely stay ahead of the ever-widening curve.

Humans, ill-prepared for attacks that targeted the soul, filled hospitals and clinics at an alarming rate, presenting with injuries their healers simply didn't know how to treat. Monsters, fewer in number and weak to even the frailest physical attacks when backed by intent, dropped off the grid left and right, falling prey to gangs and 'vigilantes' like stalks of wheat to a scythe. As more and more humans started turning up with wounds they themselves couldn't even _see_ , less monsters were turning up at all.

It was, in a word, chaos.

When Alphys asked how such a thing could be possible, Sans had told her with a humourless sneer that apparently some of the monsters who'd gone missing weren't 'human' enough to qualify as actual people.

“moldsmals, muffet's spiders, tsundereplanes, the rock family... the police won't let us file missin' persons reports for any of 'em.”

“That's a-awful!”

Awful enough that, in her anger, Alphys had been only too eager to bring up the plans she'd been making. She, Sans and Asgore had gone through her work with a fine tooth comb, carefully selecting the ones with real potential, and benching the rest.

She'd forgotten all about the plans for what would soon become Project Deus, right up until Sans had pulled them out of the pile and read over them with a grimace.

“alph... you're a genius. you may just have solved all our problems.” He hadn't sounded particularly happy about it, she remembered.

“B-but it's... I was n-never able to think of a way to g-get that one to w-work...”

“maybe not alone. but between us, 'm sure we could come up with _somethin_ ' that works. this is the answer, i feel it in my bones.”

Undyne, however, didn't agree.

She'd been appalled when she found out about Project Deus and the shield emitters and all the rest. Absolutely disgusted. It wasn't _right_ , she said. It wasn't _fair_. The thing about Undyne that not many people understood was that she had a powerful sense of justice. She was a fierce warrior and loyal unto death to her King, but she was a creature of honour, above all else.

Project Deus, from any angle, was far from honourable.

“Y-you wanted me to _do_ something _._ This is me d-d-doing something!”

“I wanted you to _stand with us_! Not – not slaughter an entire race in their sleep!” Undyne had shot back, as though Alphys herself would personally be doing the killing. “We're talking about _children_ here, Alphys! Old folks! Innocents! People who've got nothin' to do with any of this!”

“I kn-know, but what else are we supposed to d-d-do?” Alphys had asked, frustrated. “Do you think the humans plan on f-fighting fair? Do you think they'll th-think about _our_ children?”

Undyne had growled. “You don't know that! And even if ya did, does that matter?! This isn't about them, this is about _us_! Are we really gonna fight dirty just 'cause that's what _they'd_ do?!”

“... if we fought fair, they'd w-win...”

“I know! I...” Undyne had let out a groan, dropping onto the bed and clutching her head between her scaly hands. “ARRRGH! I _know_ , I just... I _can't_ be alright with somethin' like this. What's the point in winnin' if we gotta become the villains to do it?”

In the end though, Undyne had done what her King commanded of her. Doing so cost her dearly, but she carried out her duty to the letter. Honestly, she was never quite the same after that – quicker to anger, slower to forgive, colder and more distant besides. And while she'd never said as much – not even when they'd argued – Alphys _knew_...

Undyne, or at least some part of her, blamed _Alphys_ for that.

 

* * *

 

“what would you say if i told you there was a way to reverse all this? t' make it so frisk and tori never died, and none of this ever happened?”

“...count me in.”

 

* * *

 

Alphys never did find out exactly what Undyne's final straw had been. She never said, and Alphys had never found the courage to ask. It could have been so many things.

It could have been the idea of the Reset itself. The notion that mistakes could simply be erased at will didn't sit right with Undyne, who had always believed in facing the future head on. What was the worth in anything, she had said, if you could just do it all over again?

Maybe it was the process of the thing that did it. DT extraction was painful and generally unpleasant, even when handled correctly, and unfortunately, it took some considerable trial and error before Sans and Alphys ascertained what 'correctly' in this instance meant. Undyne, as Captain of the Royal Guard and therefore chief overseer of the Underground, heard a deal more about their less favourable results than Alphys would have liked... And while it was true that the humans they used were all volunteers, that hardly seemed to matter when the final product was so ghastly.

Truth be told, it was likely a little of both those things. But mostly, it was probably Alphys herself.

Undyne saw the endless hours Alphys put into her work at the lab, saw the feverish energy with which she toiled at deplorable tasks in order to accomplish an equally deplorable end. The very passion that Undyne had once so admired in Alphys, became the wedge that drove them apart. The two of them... just weren't on the same page any more. They weren't even in the same book.

They didn't talk about it. They never actually sat down together to discuss it, nor did either of them break anything off _officially_.

But their relationship _was_ broken, regardless.

By the time Alphys had figured that out, it was already too late.

Sans tried to comfort her in what small way he could. “c'mon alph – once we reset, none of this will even matter.” But he didn't really get it.

And Alphys hoped he never would.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I... don't know how I feel about this story. Truth be told, it was just a side project - something to work on when I needed a break from the other story I'm writing at the minute (which should be ready to start going up soon... hopefully. And no, it's not the sequel. I'm not ready to write that yet.)


End file.
